Not so long ago, you couldn't move for Sociologically Inclined Microhistories With Added Memoir. But times have changed, and any honest literary agent will admit that they're hard to place with mainstream publishers nowadays. A whole strain of non-fiction has, so the theory goes, been wiped out by the internet. If you want to know about elks, you're better off with Wikipedia than a SIMWAM by someone who thinks the story of how his grandfather bred them in captivity will be subtly augmented by passages exploring the links between the Swedish football team the Elks, the computer operating system ELKS, and Elkie Brooks.

If the genre is in crisis, however, survivors are clinging to the wreckage. Travis Elborough is one of them. His previous books were histories of the Routemaster bus (The Bus We Loved) and the long-playing record (The Long-player Goodbye). Wish You Were Here finds him turning his attention to the English seaside, specifically "what its story says about us and what stories in turn we've told ourselves about [it]".

The memoir element mines Elborough's childhood in Worthing, where the David Leland film that shares the book's title (and about which he writes amusingly) was filmed in 1986. He has other ties to the coast, too: his family once owned a pirate-themed eatery in Polperro in Cornwall called the Jolly Roger. "Its walls were lined with real cutlasses and its battered cod and chips were commended by Franklin Engelmann on BBC Radio's Down Your Way."

Much of what follows is as familiar as gravy. Once upon a time, we feared the sea to the point where even fishermen didn't want to live too close to it. Then Romantics such as Edmund Burke and Joseph Addison beheld it with "pleasing astonishment" as a manifestation of the sublime. The worried well flocked to it because they believed seawater to possess health-giving properties. (Elborough quotes extensively – slightly too extensively – from Jane Austen's unfinished, spa-set novel Sanditon.) The advent of the railways and, later, the Holiday Pay Act of 1938 did much to democratise coastal resorts, and the resulting boom ended only in the 1960s, when punters were wooed away from the "Victorian boarding houses and elegant bow-fronted Regency façades" celebrated in the 1951 Festival of Britain guidebook by cheap air travel and the promise of non-stop Spanish sun.

Now, if the media are to be believed, the glory days have returned. This has been the year of the "staycation" or "holistay", when we've all gone camping and embraced our beaches as "great egalitarian institutions, open to everyone and near enough free at the point of entry" instead of complaining about the pebbles. As recently as 2003, a resort such as Hastings was rubbing up against Morecambe, Hythe and Bexhill in The Idler's list of Britain's crappiest towns. The recession has changed all that. As Elborough observes: "What was once limiting about seaside towns, their remoteness and melancholy ruination, when cities were still limitless and full of nooks and crannies to be colonised and quarried, is proving to be their salvation."

When Mass Observation reporters visited Blackpool in the late 1930s, they found a disappointing lack of actual sexual activity, despite the Donald McGill postcards cluttering up the racks. Yet the seaside has retained its image as a place where inhibitions are shed. Elborough wonders if this was why, in the runup to this year's general election, a tearful Gordon Brown admitted to proposing to Sarah on a beach: "It was, admittedly, in Fife. But the point had been made."

This is a sweet, genial book – an inspired joining of the cultural dots, which occasionally resembles a saline version of Michael Bracewell's England Is Mine. Approached as a straightforward history, it's likely to irritate, to seem needlessly florid and kinetic. Its strength lies in the quality of its associations rather than in how well it follows a line traced by other, more conventional accounts.

There are problems with it, of course. Elborough doesn't always know for whom he is writing – do we really need to be told who mods were, or what sort of songs the Beach Boys sang? – and it sometimes feels as if he's borrowing authority from the writers he quotes (Orwell, Priestley, Margaret Drabble, Jonathan Raban) rather than using them to illustrate or emphasise his own ideas. But a book like this lives or dies on the strength of its author's charm, and Elborough has plenty of it.

One of his favourite buildings is Burgh Island Hotel off the coast of Devon – a recently restored art deco folly, which visitors reach in a sea tractor and which Agatha Christie requisitioned to be the exclusive Jolly Roger Hotel in Evil Under the Sun. Wikipedia will tell you that it was also used in the Dave Clark Five vehicle Catch Us If You Can. It's Elborough, though, who has the comic intuition to quote the remark by Clark's on-screen girlfriend that its interior "smells of dead holidays" and to compare the building, when on its uppers, to "a wedding cake furiously licked by a mangy dog".